Some people who visited Web sites of 850 newspapers, including the Missoulian, Sunday evening were startled to find a two-word message staring them in the face.

Rest assured it wasn't the newspapers' new mission statement.

The Infecktion Group, computer hackers believed to operate out of Brazil, infiltrated portions of the server farm at Townnews.com, which helps hundreds of weekly and daily papers publish online editions, to post the offensive message.

Brad Ward, director of production and online systems at Townnews.com, said the message may have been displayed for about an hour before the sites were shut down and the message was removed and replaced with the newspapers' normal pages by Monday morning.

"We've had denial of service before," Missoulian Webmaster Wendy Gravert said, when hackers "cause sites to be down. But to my knowledge this is the first time we've had a defacement."

Ward said newspaper sites were down for most of the evening as Townnews.com dealt with the problem.

A Google search for "Infektion Group" delivers nearly 40,000 hits, Ward noted.

"They're a busy bunch of guys, running around defacing Web sites," Ward said. "I heard they got Garth Brooks' site last week, so at least we're in good company."

Townnews.com was formerly known as International News Network, a company founded in 1989 by Marc Wilson, Robert P. Dalton and Virginia R. Wilson, then owners of the weekly Bigfork Eagle. Lee Enterprises, which publishes 44 daily newspapers, including the Missoulian, became majority partner in INN in 1996.

Among the affected newspaper sites was the Casper Star-Tribune's site casperstartribune.net. Webmasters Fred Jacquot and Greg Kearney reported difficulty in being able to load current news stories to the site for a period of about 9 hours.

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AP-NY-06-14-04 2116EDT